Laila’s daily routine begins at 4am. The 46-year-old coir worker has a busy day that’s packed with action, from discharging mundane chores such as cooking and cleaning to looking after the needs of other family members and dashing off to the workplace on time.By 8am, she would fulfil her day-to-day family obligations and leave for the workplace on foot. It is a 1.5-km walk to reach the banks of the Paravur lake where she would spend the next seven hours extracting fibre from retted husk.
Sitting beside a heap of smelly peat, Laila spoke about her working life which began at the age of eleven. “My moothamma (maternal aunt) was a coir worker and she was my mentor. I quit school after the sixth standard,” she said. All these years Laila had been doing dehusking and has never attempted any other job. “Why should I? I’m comfortable with this job though the earnings aren’t that much big. My lifestyle isn’t that expensive,” she laughs.
Laila is unmarried and is living with her father. Her two brothers and their families too are in the same house. The woman’s life shuttles between her workplace and home.
The farthest place she has gone is Kollam city, some 20km away from her house. “I’ve been to Kollam a couple of times for hospital consultations,” she says.
Laila earns an average Rs 300 if she meets the target of extracting fibre from 600 husk. “It’s achievable in summer. But during winter, the rain would hamper the work and the earning would drop to Rs 200 or Rs 150,” she says.
The meagre earnings prompted many to leave the job, she says. Her thodi (the local name for the place where the dehusking is done) once had 15 workers and it has come down to five now, she says.
‘WON’T RECOMMEND THIS JOB TO MY KIDS’
Half a kilometre away from her thodi is the spinning unit owned by Laila’s employer Pushparajan. Four of them, Sreejakumari, Saroja, Geetha and Lathika, are busy spinning the fibre on semi-mechanised units. The women work in pairs in a unit. While one rotates the wheel, the other trots towards the machine on the other end for getting the coir spun.How about the job? Sreejakumari answered straight: “I would never recommend this to my children. Hope you understand”.
The women’s spinning job starts at 6.30am and ends at 2pm. They take a single break in between — the lunch break — at 10.30am. As the remuneration is linked with the length of coir they’ve spun, the women rarely take a break. “This job requires physical fitness as one has to frequently trot towards the machine and back. None of the youngsters is interested in taking up this job,” says Baby, Pushparajan’s wife.
Baby is a housewife and has been helping her husband run the business since their marriage 35 years ago.
“At that time, my husband’s three other brothers too had spinning units. Two of them left the business after it became less lucrative. Here too, we had six units then. Now only two are operational,” she says.
The shortage of husks and manpower poses a challenge to the business, she said. “Now husk is brought from far away places. Big coir units purchase husk from Tamil Nadu,” she says.